08 August 2012 8:59 AM

Goodbye Team UK

As Team GB is cheered into the record books at the Olympics, I have been puzzling over whatever happened to Northern Ireland. The province, after all, is not part of Great Britain, which is composed of England, Scotland and Wales, but belongs to the UK – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So if Northern Irish Olympians are competing as part of Team GB, shouldn’t it have been called Team UK?

This is alluded to in today’s Times (£), where Alice Thomson records initial worries by the British Olympic Association’s director of marketing that the Olympic brand didn’t include Northern Ireland. Apparently she decided ‘The Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team’ was too clumsy. But why not settle for Team UK instead?

It appears that Northern Irish Olympians have been given the choice to be in Team GB or Team Ireland — seven are competing for GB, and thirteen for Ireland. So as far are the Olympics are concerned, therefore, the United Kingdom appears to have been abolished. The Northern Irish competitors are in real life neither British nor Irish; they are citizens of the UK. Yet for the purposes of the Olympics, they seem to have been stripped of their citizenship and left in geopolitical limbo over the Irish Sea.

The great triumph of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, or so we were told ad infinitum, was that it preserved Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom and thus defended the integrity of the nation. But at the Olympics, there is no Team UK and thus no truly national team.

The British Olympic Association itself seems a little hazy about the difference. Its website tells us:

'The British Olympic Association (BOA) is the National Olympic Committee (NOC) for Great Britain and Northern Ireland.'

It says it is

‘responsible for promoting the Olympic Movement throughout the UK’

but nevertheless goes on to talk about the Olympic participation of Great Britain. It would appear that Northern Ireland is just...well, just too damn awkward to include, too clumsy to be part of the brand. So if its competitors want to belong to Great Britain, fine; if they want to belong to Ireland, fine. Who cares?

As with sport, so with politics? Might this be an indication that the future lies not with the UK but with the Kingdom of Team GB?

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The UK has signed up to a legally binding international agreement, the Belfast Agreement 1998, whereby people from Northern Ireland can choose to be Irish or British or both. Hence Gerry Adams is Irish, not British. (He was actually banned from entering Britain in the 1990s).

It is also incorrect to call Northern Ireland 'the Province' or 'Ulster', as the province of Ulster has 9 Counties, not 6. Unionist leader Sir James Craig was offered the 9 when Westminster partitioned Ireland, but surprised the Prime Minister by saying he only wanted 6 because Unionists could only 'control' 6. His use of the word 'control' speaks volumes about that Gerrymander.

I agree with you Greg. The Olympics have become too p.c. esp in the promotion of multiculturalism. Tho' I think you were a li'l bit OTT in your comparisons with Nazi Germany & the USSR. The situation isn't that bad yet. However democracy is withering in the UK esp. wrt freedom of speech exemplified by the mini corporate dictatorship created by the IOC & their LOCOG/ODA proxies for the duration of the games.

I think the real reason why it's been 'labelled' as "Team GB" is because that's pretty much what it is; what I mean by that is that it's because of the Internationalists & Globalists that have sought and indeed seeking, to destroy nations, nationhood & identity and hat thereof. The case here is the athletes aren't the best indigenous competitors from each 'nation' within Britain, I.e. England, Scotland, Ireland & Wales. The team has more of a 'civic' sense because that's really what it is and has put together the best who have attained British citizenship.

The REAL story of the fascist Olympics (that's what it really is as you'll see described below) is the complete soviet style 'sacking/dismissal' if you will of a number of competitors on 'political grounds' for supporting & choosing a political stance that doesn't fit in with the far-left mantra where the Olympics hierarchy clearly thinks you MUST remain within. You can be a hard-line Marxist, Communist > all the way along the political spectrum to Conservative, but any further 'right' than that you are OTHER and shall be known as such. Why is the right > to radical right chunk cut off?. How this hasn't made national news I do not know, this is soviet style fascism straight from the hierarchy of the lovey-dovey, multicultural supposedly welcoming ALL (if you're political views tie in and align with that mantra) that's the REAL story of these Olympics beamed all over the world and only a few people have noticed it.

As far as I'm aware, no other Olympic athletes have EVER been kicked out of the games over `thought\speech crimes` or political affiliation. London 2012 now has TWO such cases (so far...). This means London 2012 is now more fascistic than Nazi Germany (1936), more anti-democratic than Cold-War Russia (1980), and more totalitarian than Communist China (2008). Are you proud of this Mr Coe?

That's the REAL story of these Olympics, and what (for me) will be remembered for.

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